[DRBD-user] drbd 0.6.12 + heartbeat + synchronization + machine load

Lars Ellenberg Lars.Ellenberg at linbit.com
Mon May 17 13:16:13 CEST 2004

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


/ 2004-05-17 12:20:14 +0200
\ Zanen, Sietse van:
> Hello,
>  
> I am testing drbd + heartbeat for an HA setup consisiting of two cluster
> members. The first is A Dell 2400, 256MB, Dual PIII 500, HW Raid. The
> second is a Dell 2300, 128Mb, Single PIII500, Soft RAID. Both systems
> are running RedHat 9 with 2.4.20-31.9smp kernel (the single proc box
> because of a bug in the 440GX chipset, APIC only works when running SMP
> kernel). I am using 0.6.12 as 0.7 seemed hell on my machines (loads of
> kernel oopses, panics, hangs etc.). So far I've been having good
> results. Tested failover between nodes, which all worked well. Until I
> decided to test the all out disaster scenario.
>  

I may be wrong, but some of those 2.4.20 kernels have scheduler problems.

> First I took down my primary cluster node (did this by disconnecting all
> NIC's). Failover went well as expected. Then decided to go for all-out
> by gracefully shutting down the secondary node. In this scenario you
> would boot up the secondary cluster node first, as that would have the
> latest data set. And as I want HA, decided not to wait for the other
> side of drbd to show up and make disks primary. Up until this point
> still no problem, disks would be mounted and data served from the
> secondary cluster node. 
>  
> But when I booted my primary cluster node, shit did really hit the van
> (you should see my office, it smells terrible ;-). As soon as it started
> replicating off data from the secondary cluster node, problems started.
> Immediately both of the nodes were showing lock-up problems (eg, not
> able to log in on console / ssh etc.). Already logged in sessions kept
> working except for doing su would lock up also. A 'cat /proc/drbd' would
> initially show acceptable speeds (around 5MB/s, my sync min. Syncing
> from primary node to secondary would reach 10MB/s+). Also the system
> load would slowly increase up unto the point where heartbeat generated
> failover: (If I run softdog, it would even just reset the machine)
>  11:09:37  up 10:23,  1 user,  load average: 3.58, 3.00, 2.41
> 85 processes: 75 sleeping, 7 running, 3 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states:  70.9% user  29.0% system   0.0% nice   0.0% iowait   0.0%
> idle
> Mem:   125412k av,  122820k used,    2592k free,       0k shrd,   36628k
> buff
>                      78112k actv,     796k in_d,    1624k in_c
> Swap:  787064k av,    1184k used,  785880k free                   54192k
> cached
> (CPU was usually not at 100%, but more like 25 to 30%), Load 3+ on a
> Single CPU machine, while not using that much mem and cpu time, that's
> weird.
>  
> Also at this point sync speeds would drop to under 1MB/s. Plus the
> console got overloaded with these messages:
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967294
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967294
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967294
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967294
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967294
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> drbd1: [drbd_syncer_1/4321] sock_sendmsg time expired, ko = 4294967295
> 
> I've tryd fiddling with sync parameters (sync-nice, sync-group, tl-size,
> etc.) nothing helped, although symptoms did vary (time before lock-ups
> of system, time before HB failed over, less or more of these
> sock_sendmsg messages).
>  
> As soon as Hearbeat had shut itself down, sync speed would sometimes go
> up again, but other tiimes remained low. Same thing with the load
> somtimes went down to normal values, sometimes not. System lock ups too.
> Stopping the sync by disconnecting the secondary cluster node always
> brought sysmtems back to normal.
>  
> The only way systems remained stable was doing the sync in single user
> mode. But as it's 70GB of data we're talking about and 5MB/s sync would
> take 3hrs+, this would be unacceptable downtime. I will now start with a
> new dataset and see if I can reproduce the problem. I am not going to
> wait for sync to finish in single user mode. I would not mind, if in a
> situation like this syncing the data back to the primary node, takes a
> day, but it has to be stable and the secondary node has to serve the
> data in the meantime.
>  
> My drbd.conf:
> resource drbd0 {
>   protocol = C
>   fsckcmd = /bin/true
>  
>   disk {
>     disk-size = 4890000k
>     do-panic
>   }
>  
>   net {
>   sync-group = 0
>   sync-rate = 8M
>   sync-min = 5M
>   sync-max = 10M

if you read the example config file, you find that -rate is deprecated
synonym for -max. so don't use it.

sync-nice will have no effect when you set -min to something which is
way abavoe what you typically see, since as long as the actuyl sync
throughput is below -min, syncer sets itself to highest possible
priority.

>   sync-nice = 0
>   tl-size = 5000
>  
>   ping-int = 10
>   timeout = 9

NO!
of course you may *whish* that DRBD recognises drop of connection in 0.9
seconds. but do not do this on a 100MBit link, and not with 500MHz CPU.
that will cause a packet storm whenever the connection gets congested,
congesting it even more.

timeout is in centiseconds! (read the example config file!)
default is 60, so why did you set it to 9 ?


>   }
>  
>   on syslogcs-cla {
>     device = /dev/nb0
>     disk = /dev/sdb2
>     address = 10.0.0.1
>     port = 7788
>   }
>  
>   on syslogcs-clb {
>     device = /dev/nb0
>     disk = /dev/md14
>     address = 10.0.0.2
>     port = 7788
>   }
> }
>  
> resource drbd1 {
>   protocol = C
>   fsckcmd = /bin/true
>  
>   disk {
>     disk-size = 64700000k
>     do-panic
>   }
>  
>   net {
>   sync-group = 1
>   sync-rate = 8M
>   sync-min = 5M
>   sync-max = 10M
>   sync-nice = 19

again, see comments for the sync section above!

>   tl-size = 5000
>  
>   ping-int = 10
>   timeout = 9
>   }
>  
>   on syslogcs-cla {
>     device = /dev/nb1
>     disk = /dev/sdb3
>     address = 10.0.0.1
>     port = 7789
>   }
>  
>   on syslogcs-clb {
>     device = /dev/nb1
>     disk = /dev/md15
>     address = 10.0.0.2
>     port = 7789
>   }
> }
> /dev/md14 is RAID0 made of two RAID1 pairs (md9 & md10)
> /dev/md15 is RAID0 made of two RAID1 pairs (md11 & md12)

hm.
DRBD on MD on MD on SCSI ? cute.

> 
> Output of mount commands:
> drbd1: blksize=1024 B
> drbd1: blksize=4096 B
> kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
> EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on drbd(43,1), internal journal
> EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
> Why the different block size? Both disks have this when mounting.

because the superblock access of ext fs on mount/umount is 1024.
then it reads the fs parameters, and resets the block size again to 4096.

> Sometimes I get the message, that md device used obsolete ioctl, but
> this should only be cosmetical.

yes.

> Sometimes got the message on the SW RAID systdm, that block size
> couldn't be determined and 512b was assumed.

yes.

> The SW RAID seems to outperform the HW RAID by 100%

yes. :)

> On rare occasions I saw lock-ups of fsck or mount during heartbeat
> start-up. One time even causing entire system to hang during reboot
> (killall was not able to kill a hanging mount process.)
> Maybe also important info: Some md devices were syncing at the same time
> drbd devices were syncing. This too was not acheiving high speeds. You
> would expect this, when drbd sync uses 5MB, but not when that drops. You
> then would expect md sync to go faster, but it didn't, it would stay at
> 100-300KB/s.

so don't expect performance, when you thrash your harddisks on an SMP
box with several kernel threads *plus* applications.
no wonder your box goes south.

on a very different scale of course, but what your are doing is similar
to running a high performance database with its backing storage being a
floppy. if your hardware cannot cope with what your software demands,
than thats what you get: unresponsive systems at best.

>  
> Lots of information, but probably more needed. I will let you know if I
> can reproduce the problem, when I have created new datasets to test
> with.

BTW,
ext3 is known to have performance problems on SMP under heavy io load
anyways, which is because then writes which where contiguous on UP (for
the respective applications) become scattered between multiple threads,
and all aplications will have to seek ... you know what happens.

	Lars Ellenberg



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